Barack Obama, the former-pot-smoking president, began his second term as something of a hero for backers of the nation’s marijuana legalization movement.
He’ll soon leave office as a total bummer.
In 2013, Obama’s Justice Department said it would allow Washington state and Colorado to proceed with recreational marijuana sales. Obama said he had bigger fish to fry.
It seemed only fitting for a president who loved to smoke pot as a teen growing up in Hawaii, one who delighted pot lovers by proclaiming in 2006 that, unlike Bill Clinton, he had smoked marijuana and inhaled quite frequently. After all, he said, that was the point.
On Thursday night, though, legalization advocates had grown weary of the 44th president. They scheduled a protest to throw marijuana seeds on the White House lawn to show their dismay at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s rejection of a petition to remove marijuana from its place on the list of most dangerous drugs.
The decision quashed the hopes of legalizers who thought it would be Obama who would finally remove marijuana from the list that includes LSD and heroin.